Associated Press

A decade ago, a Gold Star Mom who had lost her son in Iraq gained national attention when she staged a protest against the Iraq War near George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Leftist PR flaks took control of Cindy Sheehan's every move, keeping her in the headlines for months on end as a symbol of supposedly strong opposition to the war which toppled Saddam Hussein. In August 2005, New York…

Laurie Goodstein spotlighted that "the Vatican abruptly ended its takeover of the main leadership group of American nuns" in a Thursday article for the New York Times. Goodstein played up that the final report of the supposed "takeover" was a "far cry from three years ago, when the Vatican's doctrinal office...issued a report finding that the [nuns] had 'serious doctrinal problems.' It said the…

It was the best of coverage - it was the worst of coverage.

Today, the Census Bureau reported that retail sales in March increased by a seasonally adjusted 0.9 percent. While that was the first such positive figure in four months, it was less than the 1.1 percent increase analysts expected, and did little to calm fears that the economy contracted during the first quarter of 2015. An unbylined report at Bloomberg News and a dispatch from Josh Boak at the…

Late Monday afternoon, the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger produced a typically dodgy dispatch on the government's Monthly Treasury Statement. The Treasury Department released the March version of that report covering the first six months of the current fiscal year early Monday afternoon. The odd thing is, while it has been published elsewhere at the web sites of certain of its subscribers…

Well, this is awkward. Undermining most of what the business press has done to try to portray the post-recession U.S. economy as performing adequately under President Barack Obama, Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, told CNBC today that Hillary Clinton "can’t run as the third term of Barack Obama economically," because the recovery has been "uneven" and has only benefited "a small slice…

As we would cynically say back in the good old days in Queens [insert NYC accent]: yeah, right.  On today's Morning Joe, Associated Press White House correspondent Julie Pace claimed that one thing that made Hillary hesitate in deciding to run for president was that she "worried that her candidacy would block out Joe Biden who is quite a close friend of hers."  When Joe Scarborough expressed…

Imagine if a Republican or conservative U.S. president told an audience — on foreign soil, no less — that he didn't properly warn Americans about how long it would take for the economy to recover from a recession. "So-and-so Admits He Lied About the Economy" would be headlined everywhere. At the University of the West Indies in Jamaica on Thursday, President Barack Obama essentially admitted…

On Thursday night, the top English and Spanish broadcast networks made no mention of the latest surrounding the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal as an Associated Press (AP) investigation found that the number of delays for veterans seeking care has not improved as the scandal approaches its first anniversary.

It took the Associated Press barely 2-1/2 hours to bury the bad news in the Census Bureau's 10 a.m. release on February wholesale sales and inventories. As of 12:32 Eastern Time, Martin Crutsinger's 10:21 a.m. time-stamped story was not present at the AP's Top 10 Business stories page (saved at my host for future reference), making it quite likely that the news won't get much prominence at the…

Newly-declared 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul took a shot at the media during a Wednesday campaign appearance in Milford, New Hampshire. An unidentified reporter asked the Kentucky senator about a recent interview he did with the Associated Press that centered on the controversial issue of abortion. Paul replied, "Why don't we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a 7-pound baby in the uterus?"

The business press and the financial analysts and economists they consult continue to mostly blindly rely on the seasonally adjusted figures the government and other economic report generators hand them on a silver platter. If these de facto stenographers had dug just a little deeper a month ago, they might have avoided the serious embarassment of predicting a level of seasonally adjusted March…

New Republic staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has clearly run out of defenses for the conduct of those involved in the disgraceful, scandalous journalistic malpractice which gave rise to the now-retracted and thoroughly discredited "A Rape on Campus: The Struggle for Justice at UVA" at Rolling Stone. So here's her last refuge: Conservatism deserves some of the blame, because Sabrina Rubin…